#Haynie Speaks, re: Ali
In article <1994May4.213201.7014@ganesha.adsp.sub.org>, Thomas Giger ESCO
writes:
> As I see it, Mr. Ali has been the only person at higher management
> levels who was willing to give his best (the man is working like a
> madman all day long) and to think up every possible way to get the
> available product into the market.
As I (and most on this side of the pond) see it, the blame is clearly
on Ali. I don't know how hard he works. But given the results, it
would have been better if he didn't. When he was brought in, he did
his best to install his people throughout corporate and international
management. So if you have a problem with these people, the blame is
on Ali, the guy who hired most of them.
I can tell you that his efforts in Engineering led directly to the
demise of Commodore. Before Ali brought in Sydnes, things were
running very smoothly toward a release of AA systems in the spring of
1992, including the A1000+ ($1000 32-bit AA system) and A3000+ (an
A3000 update with AA, DSP3210, and MC68040). There was an ultra low
end A300 (low cost sub-A500), planned to complement the line, not
replace the A500. After Sydnes, who has hand picked by Ali despite
his total lack of any qualifications for the position, was had AA
purposely delayed by 6 month, the A4000 with its IDE bus rather than
the A3000+, etc. This delay caused the big financial woes of 1993,
since there weren't enough AA systems ready (you can't ramp up that
fast, especially when chips like Lisa, Bridgette, Gayle, etc are made
outside of Commodore and need to be ordered well in advance, which
they weren't). No one wanted the A600 (which we likened to the Amiga
version of the PLUS/4 — so wrong the engineers knew it), but it was
forced out in place of the A500, and the A500 cancelled. Ali did
this. And the A600 cost MORE than the A500, let us not forget.
Sydnes wasted time building what we called the A1000jr (important
symbolism here — Sydnes was the PCjr guy at IBM), an ECS based
slighly scaled down A3000. This one was so wrong no country would
order any.
> The source of trouble has always been the persons which reported
> directly to Mehdi Ali: this includes the General Managers at the
> european subsidiary level and other managers at the corporate level
> (i.e. production, etc.)
These managers were installed by Ali. Just like Sydnes. If you want
a company to work, to put movers and shakers in these places, people
who will fight you if they think you're wrong. I don't any of these
people personally, but it's extremely clear that You Didn't Argue With
Mehdi in the common mindset of this new administration.
> A result of this attitude have been the A600, the various EC and LC
> CPU versions, any other sort of cost reduction we have been seeing,
> as well as new development that was first demanded by the GM's and
> then dropped when it was ready; like the C65, the A2200, but not
> only CPU's – this goes for peripherals as well.
New development can't be demanded by the GM's, they have no direct
line to Engineering. They report to Mehdi, so does Engineering. In
many cases, such as the A2200 (aka A1000jr) and the A600, the GMs were
soundly against the product, but had it forced upon them (well, the
A2200 was so wrong it couldn't be forced on anyone). Product ideas
before Mehdi were usually created within Engineering and bounced by
marketing by Henri Rubin, the guy Sydnes replaced. Those that worked
were developed. Under Ali and Sydnes, product ideas were dictated
from above by folks who clearly had no idea of the Amiga market and
were too egotistic or uncaring to bother learning the business they
were involved in.
> Has Commodore ever been developing Amiga peripherals on their own ? I
> thought all they did was buying printers and monitors elsewhere, and
> just sticking a Commodore label on them before selling them.
Like most companies, Commore OEMs things like monitors, printers, hard
disks, etc.
—
Dave Haynie | C= Amiga, High-End Systems | Ki No Kawa Ryu
Aikidodaveh@cbmvax.commodore.com | Engineering = Art + Science | "Life was
never meant{BIX,Portal}: hazy | "The Crew That Never Rests" |
to be painless"
"Wish there was something real, wish there was something true" -NIN
-sja